There is a growing need, in the field of computer gaming, to share multimedia content and communications in real-time with other connected (e.g., online) players without interrupting in-game activity. To this end, some multiplayer games provide in-game text or voice chat to enable real-time communications between players as an alternative to external devices or third-party chat applications. However, providing concurrent video and audio communications in-game in real-time is more complicated and requires more bandwidth and processing capabilities than text or audio communications alone.
In addition to providing real-time video communications captured using a camera and audio communications captured using a microphone, there is a growing need to share activity and events that occur in-game with other players in real-time. For example, cooperative (co-op) first-person shooting games (FPS) and massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) may organize players into squads or teams that share a common objective. In these situations, it is often desirable for team members to share information with one another, including real-time visual representations of the game world from another player's perspective. However, this ability is not often supported by game developers due to the complexity of implementing such a system on a wide scale.